Television

Thursday, September 18, 2014

Texas executes woman for starvation death of child

The 30th Execution of 2014
Texas executed Lisa Coleman on Wednesday evening. Coleman was the ninth person executed by Texas this year — more than any other state – and the 30th inmate executed in the United States over the same span, reported the Washington Post.
This particular execution was also unusual for this country, because executions of female inmates have almost never happened throughout the modern era of the death penalty.
Executions of women in the United States are incredibly rare. Coleman is just the 15th woman put to death since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. That accounts for about 1 percent of the 1,389 executions over that time.
Coleman, 38, was sentenced to death after being found guilty of murdering Davontae Williams, her partner’s nine-year-old son, a decade ago. Davontae was emaciated, weighing 35 pounds at the time of his death in 2004, and had multiple injuries on his body. Coleman and Marcella Williams, her longtime girlfriend, had restrained him and deprived him of food, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
She was killed by lethal injection in Huntsville, Tex. The execution took about 12 minutes, lasting from 6:12 p.m. to 6:24 p.m., and nothing unusual happened, the Department of Criminal Justice reported. In her final remarks, she told her family and “the girls on the row” she loved them. Her last words were, “I’m done.”
Texas is far and away the most active state when it comes to capital punishment, having put 516 inmates to death since 1976. That is nearly five times as many executions as any other state (Oklahoma has put 111 people to death, while Virginia has executed 110 inmates). Of the 14 women executed since 1976, five of them were put to death in Texas.
To read more Click Here

About Matt

An analysis of crime and punishment from the perspective of a former prosecutor and current criminal justice practitioner.
The views expressed on this blog are solely those of the author and do not reflect the opinions or postions of any county, state or federal agency.